According to Sports by Brooks, OSU's freshman QB Braxton Miller was one of the additional two players in attendance at the infamous charity event where envelopes of cash were handed out. No evidence that Miller received any money, but for some reason OSU redacted his name from their NCAA filing that was released to the public:

The two “current student-athletes” referred to by Ohio State in its report to the NCAA - with the names redacted by the the school in its release of the report to the media - are Braxton Miller and current Buckeye football player Nathan Williams.

Williams also sat out of the Toledo game and will miss the Miami game due to a knee injury.

Though I cannot confirm Fickell didn’t play Miller against Toledo because the QB was named in the NCAA report - particularly after the NCAA’s last-second Toledo game blockade of Hall - you can’t help but wonder if it was a contributing factor.

I think the only thing that surprises me at this point is how bad Gene Smith and the other leaders at OSU continue to be at dealing with these types of situations. Why redact Miller's and Williams' names when releasing the NCAA report to the public? It only makes it look like you are hiding something when the info comes out (which it always does) and the public learns whose names were blacked out. If the two players did not do anything wrong, why hide their names? We aren't dealing with grades or medical history or criminal allegations, but simply the fact that they attended a charity event. Gene Smith has consistently shown an amazing ability to take whatever matter he is dealing with and make it worse.

Agreed. I can't imagine why he hasn't resigned. Still, he knows what the NCAA wants in one sense - he's a kiss-ass and a suck-up, and that seems to be the "appropriate" response as far as the NCAA is concerned...

I'd laugh at this but I know they're laughing at me for laughing at them because they always get the last laugh when it comes to cheating. I will laugh at all of it when the day finally comes that the hammer actually drops. Until then.. Stale Face.

A tSIO quarterback accepting improper benefits with a large buckeye tattoo on his upper arm coupled with complaints about his ability to be a leader and good teammate. Am I missing something? Didn't TP leave the school?

I would love this to be true, but this SBB guy always states everything as facts without ever showing proof. He simply claims these two are the players, but doesn't state how he knows this information.

It's interesting that Miller didn't play against Toledo, and this is possibly why. It's interesting, but I don't really know what much else you can conclude about it other than what has already been said a million times before this.

Ok, OSU players took money, other were stupid, tattoos, etc. etc., I'm tired of talking about OSU and I feel like we've done it enough.

(By the way, this isn't a shot at the OP, I find the information interesting as I said, I just don't think there is really much else to say besides "interesting", as evidence by my whole post basically says "interesting, now lets move on".)

The fan base doesn't even pay attention to it anymore. They just assume that the NCAA is done with them, post articles about NCAA hypocrisy, and skip on down the road. The NCAA hasn't given them or OSU a reason to think otherwise. Take cash and get caught and evidently its $0-200 for each game. If you spread this out among different runners and scapegoat a single booster, you can continue to operate in this manner pretty much indefinately. Good times.

At this point, maybe OSU should just concede the season, get its house in order with the NCAA, and try next year. They are just getting murdered in the press with the number of athletes being deemed ineligible.

DiGeronimo said his 30-year association with the Ohio State athletic program began when former basketball coach Eldon Miller asked him to hire former East Tech star Jim Smith, one of his players.

From there, requests came from the football program to hire Ohio State players for summer jobs with his construction company.

DiGeronimo said he would receive a questionnaire from Ohio State every April or May asking whether he could supply full- or part-time summer jobs and how much the work paid. He said he would put between $12 and $15 an hour and list the five or six players who worked for him the previous year.

According to NCAA rules, student-athletes can be paid to work, as long as they make what others get for the same job.

"Now I specifically told our guys, 'Don't get them hurt,' " DiGeronimo said. "The last thing I need is somebody . . . having a foot injury or something like that."

He said many of the players work in the company's car wash, cleaning trucks and equipment and sweeping. He said the NCAA showed up at the car wash six weeks ago asking whether the jobs were legitimate.

"It's not like I haven't been doing this for 30 years," he said. "If there was any question if these were real jobs, why didn't they come up and check just one time?"

DiGeronimo, who would be invited by Cooper to watch games from the sidelines and fly on the team plane to some road games, said he knew paying the players was a violation.

But he justified it, he said, by assuring himself: "Well, if the kids don't say anything, we'll be all right. And then when all this thing happened with [Jim] Tressel and then the NCAA, I was concerned, there's no doubt about it. Quite honestly, if there's no tattoo-gate, this thing doesn't come out."